I started reading this book called In the Land of the Ayatollahs, Tupac Shakur is King.  It’s a great travel diary from a Persian-Brit who goes to the Middle East for the first time.  A lot of insights into the weird causes and often hilarious realities of religious extremism, which the book’s title alludes to.

Sixteen rockets fell all around me this afternoon, the first one shook me out of bed, the last one I felt from a tiny concrete bunker packed with half-dressed soldiers who work the night shift.

Going from sleeping soundly to abject terror in a tenth of a second is tough on the brains.  It’s easier when I know it’s coming.

Like last month, right before a savage air assault, I felt really sick from all the spicy food I’d been eating.  Throwing up repeatedly in a portajohn in a foreign country at 3 a.m. makes me feel less than capable of engaging a determined enemy in a lethal contest of wits and cool.

But as the helicopters dropped in to pick us up, I decided to just get on and see what happened.  As soon as we were in the air, with the pounding vibrations and churning wind and deafening noise, I felt like a mutant warrior at the top of my game, somewhat sorry for the overmatched holy warriors out there waiting for us.

When there are people out there to fight, you can figure out, logically, why you do what you do: at best, taking a long-suffering village back from fifty murderous psychopaths; at worst, blind bloody revenge for things like rocket attacks on the trailer parks where we sleep.

But those damn rockets are so random and impersonal and impossible to defend against that you start to understand why there are so few atheists in the foxholes.

I can picture the cloaked Iraqi men on the roof of a Baghdad elementary school, screaming Allahu Akhbar as the blazing rockets shrink into the west, and the soldiers in their beds bargaining with Jesus to let them land down the street a bit.   God is the name for that which we can’t control, but can still churn us into scraps if we’re not afraid enough.

Sometimes people ask me after a shoot if I think the pictures will come out. It’s been a long time since I had to wonder about that. I just make them how I want them and that’s the end of it. Maybe I could benefit from loosening my grip on that vision, but that’s beside the point.

When some of my colleagues fire their rifles, there’s no need to ask if they hit what they were aiming at.They hit what they want to and that’s the end of it. They don’t beseech a God for his righteous fury to guide their tungsten-carbide slug, they point an infrared laser and smite. That’s how the atheist in the foxhole wins battles. It remains to be seen if that atheist can win a war.